Visual Clues Quotes

Turn off the sound in a movie, and if you can tell what's going on, the movie should work.

Our retinas and brains have been wired by a hundred million years of evolution to find outlines in a visually complex landscape. This helps us to recognize prey and predators.

Photographs don't 'reveal' much at all but instead help us generate a kind of visual vocabulary that we can use to make sense of the world and direct our attention to certain things around us. In other words, they help us learn how to see.

Guys like Spielberg and Zemeckis and really anybody who is a storyteller-filmmaker today has studied Hitchcock and the way he visually tells a story. He was the master of suspense, certainly, but visually you would get a lot of information from what he would do with the camera and what he would allow you to see as the story was unfolding.

'The Conversation' is one that, if you watch 'The Conversation' for the opening sequence, where you hear a conversation taking place as the master - this zoom from way up is zooming in over a park. And I was just absolutely blown away by it because you can hear exactly what's happening, but you don't see. You've got no idea who's talking.

We all accept the visual shorthand used throughout comics: if something's farther away, it'll be drawn with a thinner, simpler line, eventually leaving out most visual information and becoming a gesture, a skeletal representation of a thing.

Minimalism seems closest to the sophisticated storytelling of movies. Movies have really educated contemporary audiences to be the most intelligent, sophisticated audiences in history. We don't any longer need to have the relationship between one scene and the next explained. We will figure it out ourselves.

Photographs can reveal something to us, and they can also conceal things.

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.

Sometimes we misunderstand what films can do. We just throw a whole book in there, with people just talking, talking, and talking. The picture can tell, the frame can tell.

When I hosted 'Win, Lose or Draw,' it was always fascinating to me that no one knew where anything was when they had to draw a destination.

I think if you watch most of my films with the sound off, you could still tell what's going on.

In a thriller, the camera's an active narrator, or can be.

When you see a silent movie, you understand everything that's going on from the images because the images are so strong.

My photographs don't go below the surface. They don't go below anything. They're readings of the surface. I have great faith in surfaces. A good one is full of clues.

If you know what you're looking for, the illustrations might give you a tip about what is coming in that section. But it takes a lot of study and familiarity with the work for anyone to really "decode" it, and there are also images that are just thematically important, and not necessarily pointing to specific poems, so mainly it was just a fun puzzle for ourselves.

I hate it when I'm reading a comic, and the dialogue looks like stickers stuck on top to explain what's going on. For me the best is when your eye goes in a certain point and moves through the composition and then springs out on the dialogue, or gets confused in the image and then goes to the dialogue for an explanation.

The picture itself is a document. How do you mean? We're looking at a document. It gives you clues.

I can tell from about 20 yards away when someone has a manuscript for me. I can just tell - they have that look.